On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, James Ralston wrote:
> I was tempted to break down support by chipsets instead of cards, but
> I didn't know enough of the mappings among PCI IDs, Radeon chipsets,
> and card names. (For example, to my knowledge, all "Radeon 8500"
> cards are using the R200 core/chipsets. What do the QL, QN, QO, Ql,
> and BB revisions mean? I don't know.)
For those particular letters I don't know, but it isn't hard to pick
two ATI chid IDs for which the the answer would be:
No-one at XFree86 knows the difference between these chips,
but if you have server CVS version XXX one of the chips is
supported and the other isn't. Support for the second chip
is included from CVS version YYY.
I've never been convinced that there was a reliable mapping between
the chip id and the name on the box* so I wouldn't trust a list of
card names to be accurate enough to say whether the driver will work
with a particular card.
*I've bought many ATI cards in a white box with no name, or installed
in a new computer with no box at all, where I've had only the sticker
on the card to identify it. The supplier might have sent a revised version
without changing the name on the pricelist, so the card name isn't
necessarily more help than the chip ID when I try to install linux.
> > It would be worth documenting the work around for unsupported chips:
> > If your card is unsupported, try adding the line
> > ChipId 0xPQRS
> > to the "Devices" section of your config file.
> >
> > Sorry, I don't know the radeon well enough to suggest the correct
> > value, or values to try in PQRS, we may need to list different
> > values for single and dual head, desktop and laptop, and radeon
> > generations. Can anyone else help here?
>
> If I can get some good info on this, I'll be happy to document it,
> but if not, then I'd rather not mention it at all.
I can understand your reluctance, but making people aware that this
can be done is going to help many people to get their card working.
Given that a graphics card becomes obsolete about as fast as a new
version of XFree86 comes out, for anyone who buys a new ATI card,
this trick is about the only alternative to running a CVS version
of the server.
--
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
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